After Effects

25

I spent a weekend in upstate New York last fall, shooting almost exclusively time lapses.

Upon editing the footage, I found myself struggling with contrast corrections. Many of the shots had to have shadows brightened, which blew out the sky. I could have shot HDR, but that opens a whole new realm of workflow problems, not to mention triples my images.

As usual, After Effects provides the solution.

I precomposed the layer, then duplicated the precomp. Each precomp got its own individual color grading, one focusing on shadows, the other on highlights. Then, in the main composition, I simply masked out the appropriate places, such as the sky. The result is a fairly convincing portrayal of HDR in an easy to digest workflow.

While this process isn’t a replacement for true HDR, it is a useful workaround for those times when you can’t handle the image load or the workflow. It’s fast, easy, and work great.

26

The sand stretches out in front of me. The waves roll their monotonous song against the shore. Elizabeth is walking along the wet sand, watching for shells and rocks and little crabs. Occasionally she pockets something extra – special, an adopted souvenir that will live out its days as potpourri on our bathroom sink.

Mom turns to look at me. We’re seated higher, on the dry sand above the tide line. There are still some people around; tourists catching a few last waves before darkness falls.

“I’ve been looking for this place,” she says.

“What, Assateague?” I ask.

“No,” she replies and I understand her meaning immediately.

There’s nothing like an east coast beach. Hot sun, hot sand, cold water. Boardwalks that span miles, hundreds of shops with identical merchandise, menus of crabs and clams and shrimp.

I’ve been coming here since I was a kid, young enough to believe my life jacket gave me magical power. It’s not home. It’s a sanctuary, a place where I can reorganize the jumble of thoughts in my mind.

I’ve needed this too.

Due to the recent backlash against FCP, I cut this entire video on Premiere. We’re still not best friends, Premiere and I, but we are slowly gaining each other’s trust. I’m curious to see what CS5.5 brings into the mix, and if there are substantial speed increases.

My biggest complaint about Premiere is that it’s just a little too slow. Final Cut and I move (to use a cliche) “at the speed of my thoughts”. Premiere and I move “at the speed of my thoughts, plus one second of processing time”. It gets irritating.

Color grading and funness was added in After Effects. This was my first time working with audio in AE that actually needed to be synced perfectly. As a result, syncing became the most time – consuming part of the whole process. Let me tell you why.

I had tons of syncing issues. Literally days of syncing issues. Normally, I resync my masters in FCP, then export a reference movie to compressor to create the online. However, I wanted to use an entirely Adobe workflow, so that cut out the “resync in FCP” step. Instead, I was resyncing in AE, using the TIFF master and the AIFF master (exported from Premiere).

Here’s the issue, the one it took me days to resolve. Crack open a new Premiere project. Set it to be the 1080p or 720p DLSR preset. What’s the bitrate of your audio?

48kHz?

Great. Now open up Quicktime and import an .mp3 you like. Maybe a track from my buddy J Farell. Good choice.

Export that mp3 as an AIFF. What’s your default bitrate for export?

44.1kHz? Son of a…

Simple, elementary bitrate matching step that I should have caught. But I didn’t. And it took forever to figure out what the hell I was doing wrong. I present it here in the hope that I’ll spare you from the same headache.

There’s a ton of media associated with this trip. Check it out on it’s respective sites: